{ 11 } Comments

Standards-compliant or not, IE is widely used (Willingly or not) - You have to develop for it, simply because it's so widely used. But, I agree - I've never understood why such a large company like Microsoft can't (or more importantly, *don't* ) make IE standards-compliant.
The only vaguely plausible explanation I can think of is that it's implementation of CSS is required for Explorer's (the file-browser part, which if I remeber correctly is largely based of IE) display - But even if it's remotely true, it's hardly a reason to have a non-compliant browser..
- Ben

They don't because they don't have to (or they believe they don't have to). They are large enough that they can try to develop their own standards, even if those fly in the face of established standards.

Every M$ fanboy I know uses Firefox. The people that use IE simply just don't know any better.

dbr- I know that it is the most widely used browser. I'm not arguing that. What I wonder, is if the developers for Microsoft sites have just as hard as a time developing for IE as the rest of the world does. If not, what is their secret?

Christer- But don't the in-house Microsoft web developers have the same frustration that the rest of the web developers do? Take, for example, absolute positioning, or transparent png's. Don't these bother in-house devs?

Yeah forget that browser. If people still are like "let's make our page compatible with that shitty browser" you are just making your code more shitty and you arent helping Firefox. If you are like that people will still use IE. If you put a message like "your browser is not W3C compliant, get a decent one" and you point them to Firefox they will realize that their browser sucks and they will change it.

Well, unfortunately, that attitude doesn't work in corporate or business settings. I am a web developer professionally, and I just can't take that attitude. I have to make my browser compatible with IE. I just do. However, I can put links and information on my site about using a standards compatible browser, and encourage them to use it.

Let's not forget that even these supposed "standards compliant" browsers render things completely different. You just never know what you're going to get when developing a page targeted at more than one browser. We've all had to go through the "tweak" phase of an interface design.

No doubt. You can't target one browser when developing. You need to test for all of them.

But, the "supposed" standards compliant browsers, as you call them, make web development easy. Internet Explorer makes it a pain, and I wonder if internal Microsoft web developers feel that pain or not.

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